The essay aims to reconsider the interpretation of Catherine Pozzi’s poem, offered by Michelbde Certeau in his work The Mystic Fable, in the light of his most recent volume Le lieu de l’autre (The Place of the Other), that concludes what the Author «inaugurated» in the previous works. The hermeneutical focus of Certeau’s reflections is represented by the metaphor of the journey, which underlines the distance and the difference between places and times between the «I» and the «Other». Central is the theme of the unattainability of the goal, of disorientation, of the desire always pursued, but never satisfied. It is desire that depicts «the secret name of the elsewhere», in the interpretation of Michel de Certeau, who reappropriates and reworks some key ideas of Jacques Lacan.
This article aims to elucidate the concept of flesh from the perspective of vitalogical thought. The goal is to explain how vitalogical thought conceive of flesh as a revelation of concrete life. This effectiveness is made possible by the vital force, the life-principle of everything created. This vital force makes possible the symbiosis, the participation and the solidarity of all being. By means of this force, we understand not only the indissoluble relationship, even the undifferentiation between subject and object, but also the sense of community. By this dimension the subject discovers his sexual being and filiation. Thus, the attempt to understand the notion of «flesh» implies grasping the ontological structure of subjectivity in African thought: relational ontological structure of being with the world, others and God. The flesh reveals us as being incarnate in the world. It is the self-revelation of oneself which reveals himself through the mediation of the other.
This paper is aimed at taking into consideration, first of all, the items of the particular relationship between being and thought, starting by the fundamental suggestions of Gustavo Bontadini about ‘Unit of Experience’, intended as an absolute self-transparency of being. Then: neither as a production of being by thought – as Giovanni Gentile’s Actualism affirms –, nor as a receptivity of being in the thought – as contemporary realism presumes –, but as a primal correlation between being and thought. Secondly, we will try to disprove the view that the transcendental nature of thought, like that of first principles, involves a petitio principii. In order to prove this, we will consider, in particular, the arguments put forward by Graham Priest, supporter of Dialetheism.
In the 1960s Foucault designed a work entitled The Thought of Origin. This article aims to show how the book was written in various publications. In fact, the theme of origin is present in Foucault since the first research and continues throughout the 1960s, always faced by relating Husserl and Nietzsche. This path, characterized by ruptures and second thoughts, presents a progressive distancing from the phenomenological matrix present in the Introduction to Traum und Existenz and in the History of Madness, in which Foucault is under the influence of Merleau-Ponty. Coming to share Derrida’s thesis of the impossibility of right to access the origin, but going beyond the textualism of deconstruction, Foucault shows how every discourse on the origin, not only is an anthropological dispositif, but also a typical configuration of the politics of truth, whose power games must be unmasked.
«The meditation on the work of Gabriel Marcel is indeed at the origin of the analysis of this book; on the other hand, we wanted to place ourselves at the intersection of two requirements: that of a thought fueled by the mystery of my body, that of a thought concerned with the distinctions inherited from the Husserlian method of description». Thus Ricoeur, at the beginning of Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire (1950) dedicated to Marcel, presents the twofold beginning of his reflection. The needs are different and indispensable, but by no means incompatible: the tension to the rigor that invites the work of the concept (Husserl, the pure description, the intentional structures of consciousness, objectivity), and the need for depth that documents the existence as involvement (Marcel, freedom to think, the Copernican revolution of the body, the mystery). Between concept and participation, a decisive reflection emerges on the role and practice of phenomenology.
Robert Pasnau’s After Certainty tells a story about the history of epistemology from Aristotle to Hume through the establishment of epistemic ideals and their subsequent loosening when those ideals cannot be reached. Settling for less and less epistemic confidence, the epistemic quest leads fortunately not to skepticism but unfortunately to the impossibility of certainty. My aim is not to replace asnau’s story of epistemology but to highlight the presuppositions which determine his «dismal verdict» before proposing a switch in perspective. By drawing on contemporary theories of testimony, I focus on the class of philosophers who maintained two channels to knowledge – natural reason and «faith» – to argue these philosophers’ not only anticipate the limitations of natural reason but escape Pasnau’s discouraging conclusion. In shifting to these thinkers’ understanding of «faith» not as groundless belief but as trust in a speaker, the possibility of certain knowledge remains open if the speaker is divine.
This paper aims to develop an answer to a twofold question: in the Sophist, what does the aporetic notion of falsehood amount to, from a theoretical point of view? And, consequently, how can be theoretically defined the concept of truth Plato is rejecting in order to provide a new account of truth (and falsehood)? The two questions are, in fact, deeply related. Thus, the strategy will be as follows: firstly, the Plato’s «not-being as difference» account employed to solve the «ontological falsehood» puzzle will be recalled and its consequences examined; secondly, an analysis of the correspondence theory of truth Plato seems to endorse in the Sophist will be provided; finally, a suggestion concerning the theoretical nature of Eleatic account of truth – i.e. the account Plato is questioning – will be made.
This paper aims to examine the semantic and rhetorical strategies used by Proclus and Damascius in order to show the absolute transcendence of the First Principle, the archè tôn pánton, which can also be understood as the «Absolute». These linguistic and rhetorical strategies appear organized in a system that constitutes an effective «rhetoric of the Absolute». Its aim is not merely to demonstrate that the authentic First Principle is prior to everything and therefore different from everything and beyond every kind of determination and predication, but in particular to convince and in the same time to persuade that the «Absolute» cannot be grasped in a rational and conceptual way, because it is beyond every relation and meaning. It is consequently above every kind of thinkability.
The Lectura Thomasina of William of Peter of Godin († 1336) typifies the transmission of Thomas Aquinas’ thought in the Dominican theological schools between the end of the 13th century and the first decades of the 14th century. By combining the typical structure of a commentary on the Sentences with a long series of quotations from Aquinas’ writings, Godin composes an original teaching compendium (still unpublished), which offered a key to understanding the first diffusion and assimilation of certain disputed Thomistic doctrines. Through an in-depth analysis of the question Utrum omnium hominum sit unus intellectus possibilis (II, dist. 16, q. 1), the present study aims to provide a very representative example of this working strategy, by exploring Godin’s reworking of Aquinas’ noetic and consequently its influence on the Parisian wide-ranging discussions on the unity of the intellect at the beginning of the 14th century.
This article examines the key-aspects of John Buridan’s theory of human generation by consideringb his commentary on pseudo-Albert the Great’s De secretis mulierum. In qq. 3-7 of the treatise, the roles of male and female in reproduction are especially put under investigation. This topic was at core of late medieval theories of generation and belongs to a broader debate on the opposite views on human biology held by the philosophical and the medical traditions, i.e., to the so-called «controversy between philosophers and physicians». With this analysis of Buridan’s text, Buridan’s acquaintance with the medical knowledge will be pointed out, together with his willingness to introduce medical elements in his natural philosophy in order to shape his theory of human reproduction. This will contribute to shed new light on the relationship between (natural) philosophy and medicine in the Fourteenth century.
In the context of the late medieval diffusion of Scotism and nominalism, the Jesuit Manuel Gois, author of commentaries to some Aristotelian works on the philosophy of nature,receives some ideas of Henry of Ghent and Scotus (such as the actuality of prime matter and the immediate inhesion of quantity in the matter), although moderating them within a substantially Aristotelian position. After an initial presentation of John of saint Thomas’ critique to the Cursus conimbricensis physical treatises and a succinct consideration of the notion of matter according to the Augustinian-Scotist tradition and to Manuel Gois himself, the article analyses three typical questions of Gois’ natural philosophy that are logically connected to each other: the doctrine of the entitative act of matter, the possibility of a matter lacking all form, supposito interventu divino, and the matter as the quantity immediate inhesion subject.
This article investigates the ambivalent kinship between Jacobi’s notion of faith (Glaube), and Spinoza’s idea of intuitive knowledge. I argue that, while Jacobi presents his personalistic philosophy of faith as opposed to Spinoza’s monistic rationalism, his idea of Glaube as an intuitive access to reality is directly inspired by Spinoza’s third form of cognition. Jacobi’s reception of Spinoza’s doctrines of truth, of universality, of common notions and of God as the first certainty is of the utmost importance for the development of his own philosophy; yet, in the end, Jacobi refutes Spinoza’s attempt at uniting deduction and intuition: he affirms the content of the scientia intuitiva while rejecting its form. In conclusion, I imagine a possible Spinozistic reply to Jacobi’s critique.
Although this view is largely rejected today, Fichte has traditionally been conceived as a thinker who developed a theory of the isolated individual subject verging on solipsism. His philosophy is therefore even today commonly referred to as «subjective idealism» in order to emphasize this aspect. The present article argues that this traditional reading of Fichte’s role in the history of philosophy is a misunderstanding. In fact, he had a detailed theory of human social and political relations. Moreover, his understanding of the individual is dialectical and clearly acknowledges the necessity of other individuals right from the start. This can be seen most clearly in his theory of recognition. I want to suggest that Fichte’s theory of social relations should enjoin us to cast off once and for all the idea of him as a subjectivist or solipsistic thinker. Given the importance of his notion of recognition, we need to reexamine his role in the development of German philosophy after Hegel.
This article wants to show theoretical aspects of Hyppolite’s interpretation of Fichte and Hegel. The main topic of Hyppolite’s relation with German idealism is the metaphysics’ metaphysics’ transcendental foundation. In this foundation’s formal structure takes shape the relationship between philosophical conceptual element, philosophical systems’ history, experience and history tout court. To reach this purpose, the article investigate the relationship between ontology and phenomenology or between Hegel’s Lehre vom Wesen and Lehre vom Begriff. From this relationship emerges the aporetical notion of «absolute difference».
The paper provides an interpretation of Putnam’s ontological pluralism as articulated in the Philosophical Papers and The Meaning and the Moral Sciences, with respect especially to Quine’s ontological relativity. The model-theoretic argument is usually taken to support an anti-realist ontological view analogous to Quine’s, on which determining the meaning of words univocally is impossible. Contrary to this view, the paper argues that Putnam’s criticism of the indeterminacy of translation shows that the rejection of metaphysical realism does not amount to an anti-realist view. Rather, Putnam proposes a ‘sophisitcated’ realism admitting of a plurality of equivalent and mutually irreducible descriptions of the same fact. The paper concludes by pointing out that the compatibility between ontological pluralism and realism is the result of a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Kantianism obtained thanks to the mediation of pragmatism.
This contribution seeks to clarify an interpretative problem on a quotation that appeared in the Sulwân al Mutâ, text of the medieval philosopher Ibn Zafar al-Siqilli. Michele Amari attributes it to Luke the Evangelist, but we will prove that he could be wrong.
This essay discusses some key passages of Gerardo Cunico’s recent Kantian study La speranza e il senso. Metafisica ed ermeneutica in Kant (Mimesis, 2018). It seeks to understand how hope and sense are related to each other in Kant’s ethical theology. In particular, it analyzes the fecundity of his critical metaphysics and his dialectic of hope in a cosmopolitical and pluralistic perspective.
F. Benigni, Itinerari dell’antispinozismo (E. Costa) - V. Costa, Élites e populismo (V. Perego) - D. Jakovljević, Erkenntnisgestalten und Handlungsanweisungen (T. Mauri) - F. Margoni, Il bambino di Platone (F. Pennestrì) - R. Roni, Il flusso interculturale (R. Pozzo) - M. Schepelmann, Kants Gesamtwerk in neuer Perspektive; Der senile Kant? Zur Widerlegung einer populären These (R. Pozzo) - A. Stella, «Metafisica Originaria» in Severino (P. Sensi) - A. Stokke, Lying and Insincerity (E. Paganini) - F. Verde, A cosa serve oggi fare storia della filosofia? (E. Bartolini)
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